23,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Students learning modern foreign languages often comment that it is just too hard to learn, and remember, all of vocabulary presented to them. Yes, there is a lot of content that needs to be covered, and a lot of vocabulary that needs to be learned. But there is a way of making this process engaging and motivating. Language lessons needn't be full of grammar worksheets, endless drilling and rote learning lists of vocabulary. Learning languages isn't always fun and games. But these aren't games; they are fun learning activities. And they can help revolutionise language teaching; enabling teachers to authoritatively impart knowledge while fostering a thirst for knowledge and love of learning in their students. First, the Vocab Fun Learning Activities (VFLAs) learn the vocabulary in ways which will improve recognition and recall. Then, the Fun Learning Activities use this vocabulary knowledge to build sentences and paragraphs; explore and use this language while keeping the whole class engaged and actively learning. The activities are designed to encourage all students to participate and learn more through enjoyment. Based on the author's extensive classroom experience, and underpinned by research into how students learn best, each activity comes complete with a detailed explanation and plenty of ideas for variations, differentiations and extensions. The activities come with example vocabulary lists in French, German and Spanish as a starting point, which are all available for download via a link provided in the book. However, the activities will work effectively in any language and with any vocabulary list of the teacher's choosing, and can be adapted to suit every topic, learning objective and age range. Discover ready to use activities which will make for outstanding lessons in every class and ensure engagement, motivation, rapport, progress and attainment over time.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
Foreword
by Sir Christopher Stone, Chief Executive, The Arthur Terry Learning Partnership
This is an excellent book written by an outstanding teacher. I have experienced the author’s work at first hand. He enthuses, excites and captivates young and old alike.
The book tackles the thorny issues experienced by MFL teachers everywhere, i.e. how do students learn vocabulary? What is exciting is that he comes up with solutions which actually work, giving children ‘more confidence and … trust in the classroom, increasing their thirst for more knowledge.’ I am not sure that you can ask much more than that!
At a time when behaviour in schools is a key area for Ofsted and the government, it is also worth noting that the use of Vocab Fun Learning Activities ensures that ‘students engage in learning … with the knock-on effect of creating better behaviour for learning, which in turn allows the teacher to impart knowledge more authoritatively.’ Brilliant!
In conclusion this book should be available in every school. It is inspirational, revolutionary, thought provoking and works … just like the author.
Contents
Chapter 1
Introduction and Philosophy
My childhood summers meant staying in a gîte in Brittany. It wasn’t just the crêpes I looked forward to, but entering another culture, visiting local restaurants and vast hypermarchés and experiencing the joy of conducting simple transactional exchanges using words in a ‘foreign language’. Here were opportunities for bringing out my Collins French phrasebook and dictionary, not just for decoding the panneaux de signalisation and the plats du jour, but to sit quietly learning lists of vocabulary and phrases which I could then try out in real life scenarios. I could say things and make people react. I’d discovered this secret code! And the beginnings of a life-long passion.
In my first French lesson at secondary school my teacher gave me a present: a textbook to use in class and for homework. I was thrilled! Two weeks into Year 7, the teacher conducted a listening activity in class where we had to listen to the French football results from Ligue 1 and write down the score: ‘Paris Saint-Germain trois, Marseilles deux.’ It was just as well there were no 10-0 victories as we had only learned the numbers up to five. Such memories stick; I remember thinking, ‘Wow, two of my favourite things in one class, football and languages!’
In Year 11, with exams looming, I had to revise for my German GCSE reading and listening papers. We had been told to ‘learn your topic vocab!’ With my Letts GCSE German Study Guide I locked myself away in my room and learned all of the vocabulary on all of the topic lists! When I heard Holzhaus I felt smug because this was a word I knew, perhaps picking up a mark that few other students would have got. I realised that language exams were basically about vocabulary.
As a trainee teacher, Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT) and Recently Qualified Teacher (RQT), I began to explore the transactional nature of teaching languages in general and of teaching vocabulary in particular. I had started my teaching career full of enthusiasm, armed with a textbook, a scheme of work and a stack of PowerPoint slides. My work in the classroom was driven by this familiar, well-trodden path; I needed to cover the course. It was a struggle keeping to the schedule, but I completed the textbook by April.
It was in my fourth year of teaching that I had to rethink my approach. I had hoped that this roadmap was serving my students well, but when their reading and listening exams came along many of the students found parts of the foundation reading paper difficult. One student said, ‘I didn’t know gare routière.’ I said, ‘Oh, it’s only one mark. It’s bus station, don’t you remember? We did that in Year 10 when we did travel and holidays.’ Well, had they remembered, they would have got the mark.
A colleague who had been teaching the top set told me that she never thought to teach the word grève, which the students needed to know in order to get a mark on the higher paper. I spent that summer holiday worrying about how I could ensure that every student knew words like gare routière and grève, which are part of everyday French life, not just words appearing on exam papers!
So, what to do? I was aware of the exam board’s prescribed list of vocabulary, but I had never thought deeply about how to teach a word in Year 10 and be certain that the students would remember it for their exams in Year 11. Just because I could confidently say, ‘I taught that word in Year 10, so if it comes up in an exam next year then great, I’ve done my job’, it did not necessarily mean that the students would remember that word or recognise it when they saw or heard it.
I had been teaching vocabulary in the modern foreign languages classroom by writing the words on the Interactive Whiteboard, modelling the pronunciation, getting the students to repeat it, and checking their pronunciation. Towards the end of the lesson I measured their progress by asking the students to recall what they had learned. But even so, the students were not retaining the vocabulary. More was needed.
My personal way of learning vocabulary – which had been to simply stare at a list of words and repeat them to myself over and over again – was never going to inspire students. Nor did I think the best course of action would be to write to parents and recommend they buy their child a Collins French phrasebook and dictionary to read in their quiet moments. Instead, I asked myself:
In my experience, how do students learn vocabulary?Can I identify which knowledge is more important for students to learn in order to improve their chances of success?Can I introduce activities in the classroom so that when I impart this knowledge the students remain engaged and motivated when practising it?Is there a more effective way of getting students to remember more content (vocabulary) over a longer period of time?During my time as a trainee teacher on my PGCE and as an NQT, the best teachers I had seen had always struck me as ‘entertaining content deliverers’ (particularly with Year 7 classes). They imparted knowledge and practised the language in a variety of ways, all of which focused on learning through repetition. I had experienced some of this as a student in Year 7. My teacher used flashcards to present a picture, would say the word and get the class to repeat it. Once all the flashcards had been seen, we were presented with random cards and asked to identify them. Were we being exposed to as much language as possible during the lesson? Given that the teacher only showed one flashcard at a time, clearly not. Students could be shown far more words on a PowerPoint slide.
First, I had to let go of the old pattern. I had been creating PowerPoints with just one word or phrase on a slide. It dawned on me that I could expose students to far more vocabulary simply by putting more of it on the slide. The slide would still draw their attention, but now there was much more to see and learn. I would take advantage of the natural tendency to scan everything in sight. It was my own hunch, not based on any teaching and learning evidence.
This was a start. However, simply showing more words and relying on more repetition would not guarantee improving students’ recall of the all-important vocabulary and grammar points. In the foreword to Lemov’s Practice Perfect, Dan Heath stresses that it is not just repetition that improves performance but correct practice. You need the right kind of practice with the right mindset: it’s not about being weak or bad. ‘To practice is to declare, I can be better.’1 Improving students’ performance in the classroom involves conducting a combination of activities that keep students motivated and engaged over a period of time. They are repeating and practising the vocabulary with the teacher, and then deliberately practising retrieval. And when the students look back at what they were doing, they realise they were having fun! It’s this strategy over time that has the greatest impact on their ability and attitude to learning a foreign language.
There were setbacks along the way. Students in the exam were still failing to recall vocabulary which they had covered the year before. I had taught this vocabulary, so why hadn’t they known it? I remembered the second key question I had asked myself: can I identify which knowledge is more important for students to learn in order to improve their chances of success? Here was an opportunity to revise what I was doing. I analysed dozens of reading and listening papers, looking for recurring vocabulary which was essential for getting the marks on any reading or listening paper. For example, for my Spanish group the essentials were los deportes acuáticos (on the 2010 WJEC Reading paper) and compartir, which would greatly aid understanding to answering a question (on the 2010 AQA Higher Reading paper).
I compiled a list of words and the odd short phrase based on this frequency analysis; this became the Key Vocab List. You might say that some vocab is more important than other knowledge; although the exam board prescribes a set list of words, it is not ranked. Having prioritised this list of words and phrases, I put them on a PowerPoint, but I still needed to ensure that the students knew this vocabulary. I needed answers to my other questions: what kind of activities would engage and motivate the students? What was the most effective way of getting students to remember more content (vocabulary) for longer? Or to put it another way: how could I make it stick in a fun and engaging way so that I was almost tricking students into learning?
The words on the Key Vocab List came from different topics and in no particular order. Textbooks impose some arbitrary order based on topics, but there was no real reason for teaching vocabulary in that order just because that was how it appeared in a textbook or scheme of work. Learning had to be more flexible and allow for practice at getting key vocabulary into students’ long-term memories. So whenever I taught a topic, I always included additional practice of key vocabulary unrelated to the topic.
With this philosophy in mind, I devised as many ways as I could think of to get the students to practise this key knowledge in class. I didn’t think they would respond positively to vocab test after vocab test; however, being reasonably sporty, I realised that if the practice was competitive it would be more engaging. This, then, was the basis of the Vocab Fun Learning Activities (VFLAs) which focused on students practising the language in a fun way. All of the VFLAs involve the teacher standing at the front of the class showing a PowerPoint slide of key vocabulary on the board. To test retrieval, I constructed PowerPoint slides on which I could cover up the English meanings. For the competitive element, I divided the class in half with students on one side competing against the other.
Several VFLAs can be used in the same lesson to practise the knowledge and to test recall. Varied and spaced practice has proven successful in ensuring that students acquire core knowledge. In Make It Stick, the authors suggest the following:
To be most effective, retrieval must be repeated again and again, in spaced out sessions so that the recall, rather than becoming a mindless recitation, requires some cognitive effort. Repeated recall appears to help memory consolidate into a cohesive representation in the brain and to strengthen and multiply the neural routes by which the knowledge can later be retrieved.2
I had been employing this practice-retrieval effect using the VFLAs with groups of students from Year 10 onwards (though when I started I wasn’t aware of the theory behind it). The term ‘retrieval’ is now frequently used instead of ‘test’, not only because of the negative associations of that word, but because it more accurately describes what happens during recall.3
After some VFLAs using key vocabulary items, I would test retrieval by covering up the English meaning on the PowerPoint slide. The logic was that in order to do well on a reading and listening paper students do not necessarily need to be able to spell the Target Language word because the source material on these papers is always in the Target Language. Therefore, I was practising recognition-retrieval. Having covered up the English meaning I would then give the students some time in pairs or individually to write down the English meaning or I would conduct a different type of quiz to practise retrieval.
The VFLAs create competition between individual students, or teams, or each half of the class. Something as simple as telling the students that the pair who could write the greatest correct number of words from the slide would receive one of the language trophies (which I would give out, and at the end of the lesson take back in again) can act as a powerful motivator.
These class activities are not frivolous games. For me, the idea of a language game implies superficiality. In the past the well-known language game Splat (see FLA #23) always worked well as a game. However, did it allow all of the students to practise as much vocabulary as possible? Were all of the students involved all of the time? What were the other students doing while the splatters were doing their splatting? Was there an objective behind the practice that the students were aware of or was it just a way to wind down at the end of the lesson?
Just showing a list of what would be, in the students’ eyes, a list of arbitrary words would not be motivating. However, explaining how what they are doing in class is directed towards achieving exam success can be very powerful. This is why I talk about selling the idea, which means linking the activity with the long-term objective and encouraging the students to adopt a positive attitude towards learning.
To maximise learning, the students need to practise this key vocabulary at some time during every lesson or at least every other lesson. This provides spaced practice. By running VFLAs with the Year 10 class for the practice and retrieval of key vocabulary in every lesson, their exam results showed phenomenal improvements. This vindicated what I was doing in the eyes of the students. They could see the purpose of it and that it was working. This gave them more confidence and built trust in the classroom, increasing their thirst for more knowledge. The attitudes to learning changed and a climate of competition developed: a team of students and the teacher were now competing against the exam.
After the reading and listening exams, the students came to tell me just how easy they had found both exams. They rattled off words they recalled as answers to questions and said these were the easiest exams they had taken so far – a stark contrast to my first GCSE group. Come results day in August the Spanish results were incredible: the students had achieved 100% A*–C and 81% A*–A. The local media became interested with The Sentinel and Crewe Chronicle referring to them.4 With the reading and listening results an overwhelming majority of students had exceeded their target grades.
I had proven to myself that with learning, engagement and progress I could help to achieve excellent outcomes for students. Furthermore, this approach led to fifteen students choosing to study Spanish beyond GCSE at AS level. Clearly these students did not perceive languages as too difficult.
The following year I adopted the VFLA practice with my Year 9 group but met some resistance when I suggested to a colleague that they could adopt part of this strategy in their own teaching. This belief that ‘my students don’t learn like that’ is revealed as a fallacy when you examine what actually works for transferring as much knowledge as possible from a student’s short-term memory to their long-term memory by revisiting it and practising it at spaced intervals. The way to convince colleagues is through results and students’ performance – you must lead by example. But part of that example is demonstrating continuous improvement; there is still a long way to go. As language teachers, one of the ultimate goals is to create an environment where students are speaking the language independently. But this independence can only come once the students have a core body of knowledge with which to work.
The role of the teacher
The teacher’s role is to inspire, engage, support and promote students’ learning. Teachers also act as a role model for the students: just as the students practise vocabulary and other language features, the teacher is likewise practising teaching. Teaching is an art that has to be learned. The more you practise, the better you become, or as Parker Palmer puts it: ‘Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives.’5
Both teacher and students need to know that they are engaged in purposeful activity which will lead towards mastery. It’s not about the teacher showing off their own knowledge but rather ensuring that the students are given enough opportunities to acquire their own body of knowledge.
Students must first acquire sufficient language knowledge and reach a basic level of automaticity with it. Year 7 students are initially dependent upon their teacher imparting all of the basic language knowledge that they need. You could think of the class as a learning organism, which collectively takes in the new information, and in which the individuals learn from each other, and from each other’s mistakes. The more they hear, see and practise, the more likely they will achieve the broader goal of automaticity with the language.
The Ofsted framework grade descriptor for outstanding quality of teaching includes the following: ‘Teachers and other adults authoritatively impart knowledge to ensure that pupils are engaged in learning, and generate high levels of commitment to learning across the school.’6
My experience of using the VFLAs is that students engage in learning and this has the knock-on effect of creating better behaviour for learning, which in turn allows the teacher to impart knowledge more authoritatively.
In my NQT year, there was an aversion to teacher-led lessons and teacher instruction. One observer commented that my lesson was ‘very heavy on teacher talk’, and that I needed to ‘find ways of encouraging students to learn more independently’. I’m not sure how this Year 7 group could have worked independently, as this was a new topic and the class had not encountered any of the words before. Recent work by John Hattie, who has carried out a vast meta-analysis evaluating the success rates of different teaching approaches, has shown that direct instruction is one of the most powerful teaching factors. What this means in practice is that students are taught the knowledge first. They see the words in the Target Language, and the teacher models the pronunciation. Then they are free to practise this independently. The VFLAs present the language content first; the students then practise this in an engaging way. Consistent engagement with the lessons is a huge factor in students opting whether to continue with further study of a language.
Fun Learning Activities
The FLAs are about sentence structure and ways to practise paragraph-building, and thus have a different function from the VFLAs, which focus on making vocabulary and short phrases stick and on moving as much language into students’ long-term memories as possible.
The Fun Learning Activities (FLAs) came next. Most of the FLAs have the students working in groups, practising the language independently from the teacher. To a greater or lesser extent all of the FLAs rely on the students having already acquired the relevant background knowledge, such as basic sound-spelling links and the International Phonetic Alphabet in Pronuncistation Funology (FLA #34). Fast-Forwarded Learning (FLA #26) has the teacher record a clip of themselves teaching a grammatical point not yet covered with the class. During the showing of the clip the students are asked to note down how they think they could manipulate the grammar point themselves. However, in order that the students may complete the activity, this clip must refer to knowledge they have already acquired. That is why in the very first lesson with a Year 7 group it would be difficult to conduct a FLA without having first imparted and practised some vocabulary and grammatical knowledge using the VFLAs.
The aim, therefore, is first to impart the vocabulary knowledge that the students need and then to have the students demonstrate that they can use and adapt this knowledge in other contexts. The key message is that students’ learning ‘requires the guidance of teachers, the diligence of repeated practice and sustained effort in order to be achieved’.7
During a recent Ofsted inspection the Lead Inspector observed my lesson with a Year 7 Spanish group and included the following passage in the school’s Ofsted report:
In the very best lessons, teachers use creative approaches to teaching which help students enjoy their learning and make considerable progress. For example, in two Year 7 Spanish lessons where the teaching was outstanding, teachers used imaginative and fast-paced activities to help students become confident in the new phrases. As a result, students proudly showed how fluent they had become in talking about likes and dislikes, showing excellent attitudes to learning.8
In that lesson I used several VFLAs to practise knowledge of school subjects and opinion phrases.
Then the students went To The Walls (FLA #14) to build their own sentences on the Magic Whiteboards around the room (see Chapter 2). This is a technique I frequently use in order to get students to prove to me, other students, and most importantly to themselves that they are able to write well-formed sentences. Once I have checked what has been written, the students sign their names under their work as evidence that they can do this.
With changes afoot, where lessons will no longer be graded by Ofsted, it would seem that rather than just ‘turning on the Ofsted lesson’ and getting a one-off snapshot grading, you need to be able to explain and justify what you do in the classroom to help students progress in the long term. After all, this gives a fairer reflection of the quality of teaching and learning over time.
Reflection
One of the greatest effects on student learning, according to Hattie, comes when teachers reflect on and learn from their own teaching. I feel that the following points define outstanding teachers.
Outstanding teachers:
Ensure that students engage fully with what is being taught;Develop strategies for teaching new content;Impart new knowledge, and then monitor students’ learning by frequently testing retrieval of this new knowledge;Put themselves in the students position to understand better how they are learning.9The journey and reflection on my own practice has involved all of these bullet points. What I find so exciting is that these characteristics, not only are officially referred to in Hattie’s research but, could apply to any teacher in any subject who is flexible in wanting to learn and adapt their own practice to improve outcomes for students. This book’s activities and philosophy is my way of encouraging other teachers to do this.
In addition, teachers should be objective in their grading, and not use it to reward or punish students, and they should encourage students to think creatively, rather than using worksheets which can reduce engagement and limit thought.10
I hope that the idea of the VFLAs and FLAs supported by the attitudes to teaching described here with reference to Hattie will lead to success for both students and teachers in their own journey of language-learning and teaching.
1 D. Lemov et al., (2012) Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Betterat Getting Better, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. p. xiii.
2 P. C. Brown et al., (2014) Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. pp. 28–29.
3 B. Carey, (2014) How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where and Why it Happens, London, Macmillan. p. 93.
4 See http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/marks-students-lead-way-making-grade-host/story-13230386-detail/story.html and http://www.crewechronicle.co.uk/news/local-news/alsager-school-gcse-results-5607224.
5 J. Parker Palmer, (2007) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. p. 5.
6 Ofsted, (2015) School Inspection Handbook. Ref: 120101. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-inspection-handbook.
7 Robert Peal, (2014) Progressively Worse: The Burden of Bad Ideas in British Schools, London, Civitas. p. 194.
8 Ofsted, (2013) Inspection Report: Heart of England School, 13–14 November. p. 5. See http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/inspection-reports/find-inspection-report/provider/ELS/136909.
9 J. Hattie, (2012) Visible Learning For Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, Abingdon, Routledge. p. 23.
10 Hattie, (2012) p. 36.
Chapter 2
Magic Whiteboards and Mini-Whiteboards
The traditional layout in most classrooms (depending on the subject) is to have a whiteboard (one you can write on with a marker pen) or an Interactive Whiteboard (IAW), or both, at the front of the room. This was not the case for my first classroom as an NQT. There was an IAW at the front of the class and a whiteboard on the right-hand side of the room, so if I wanted to write anything on the whiteboard I had to march over to one side of the room to write on it with a marker pen and then march back to the front to work my limited IAW magic.
I had a working knowledge of how to use the IAW but I found that when issues occurred, such as the pen-nib not connecting with the board or the board having to be recalibrated, this led to a loss of lesson and learning time. There was little value for the students watching me clicking on the wrong things or trying to find a pen with a working nib. The only thing they were learning was perhaps that there is sometimes a more straightforward way to make the most of learning time than using new classroom technology just for the sake of using it.
Regardless of my technical proficiency at using the IAW (which was never going to eclipse the average Year 8 student’s tech-savvy skills), if I couldn’t give timely feedback to the students efficiently then my own ICT skills didn’t matter. I needed a board on which I could rely, one board upon which I could instantly write bits of language that the students might need, and another board next to that on which there was an image or text projected that I was using as the language source.
One weekend I solved the problem of having easier access to a whiteboard by going out and buying one myself. This board was on wheels, and the next Monday morning I rolled it down the corridor past the head teacher’s office and into the corner of my classroom right next to the IAW. However, once I’d put the whiteboard-on-wheels next to the IAW, there wasn’t an awful lot of space at the front of my classroom; I’d literally trapped myself into a corner – a slave to teaching and learning! Eventually I had a fixed whiteboard fitted next to the IAW but kept the whiteboard-on-wheels in the corner. Occasionally I asked students to write up sentence examples on that wheelie-whiteboard as an extension task, and this corner became known as the ‘extension-task corner’.
When students finished a long piece of written work I found that the wheelie-whiteboard in the corner worked a little like a visualiser (a piece of hardware that projects whatever you put under it) in that it revealed their perfections or imperfections which I and the rest of the class were then able to see and comment on. Whiteboards make progress (or lack thereof) visible, and enable both teacher and students to assess if others have ‘got it’ or not. They also allow instant corrective feedback: students write, you tell them which bits are right or wrong and why, and they correct it right there and then in front of you. As Lemov reminds us, giving speedy feedback leads to success.1
This encouraged me to use mini-whiteboards more often. I’ve always been a fan of the mini-whiteboard, and was fascinated to learn that Ross Morrison McGill has one stitched to his apron, another to the outside door of his classroom and one more to his planner.2 I like the idea, as McGill puts it, that mini-whiteboards can ‘help solve problems with students one-on-one, or in small groups around a table, without the need to stop a whole class from working’.3
A practical way of providing more flexible writing space came from a technological advance. The Magic Whiteboard™ was demonstrated in an episode of Dragons’ Den in 2008.4 This is a reusable and removable thin film plastic writing surface which you can easily stick to the wall. By sticking several Magic Whiteboards (MWBs) around my walls there would be enough writing space for several pairs of students to use. Another advantage of these whiteboards is that they can be stuck over doors, cupboards, windows and parts of displays, and easily cleaned or removed at the end of the lesson.
I’m not advocating using MWBs as a universal solution; they are just alternatives to the mini-whiteboards. Many of the FLAs can be adapted to be used on mini-whiteboards. (In this book, I’ll refer to the Magic Whiteboard™ as MWB, and the mini-whiteboard as, well, mini-whiteboard.)
By sticking several pieces of MWB up around the classroom I was aiming to:
Enable students to model longer written examples for the whole class to see.Create mini-classrooms within a classroom.Create a gallery of ‘work in progress’ and modelling to be displayed during lessons.Vary the more traditional approach of students with mini-whiteboards facing the teacher.The aim was not to replace mini-whiteboards but to add flexibility in the classroom. At that time I was not aware of other teaching and learning organisations using MWBs as I was planning to do. However, I have since discovered that it has been adopted in all of the 140 BusyBees and LeapFrog nurseries.
Andrew Old’s educational blog (Scenes From The Battleground) refers to the use of mini-whiteboards in a school he worked in. To a post asking what the issue with mini-whiteboards is his response was that they sometimes seem to be forced on teachers when it simply isn’t worth it. Old is not attacking mini-whiteboards per se. He says, ‘They can be useful but they should not be obligatory.’ He also illustrates negative points about the use of mini-whiteboards:
I observed a top set RE lesson where students were instructed to write ‘arguments for and against the existence of God’ on mini-whiteboards. These were high achieving (and highly coached) kids. A lot of them were writing mini-essays that were virtually unreadable.
I have seen PGCE students struggle to manage classes with mini-whiteboards and also spend hours trying to sort, clean and find a full set to use. It is not something that all classes are receptive to, yet they were convinced that they were required to try it.5
The first point Old makes was one of the reasons why I thought it would be better to use MWBs rather than mini-whiteboards: they simply have a lot more space for students to write on. Mini-whiteboards are roughly A4 size, and MWBs are 60cm by 80cm; the same size as flip chart paper.
A number of FLAs refer to using MWBs. Having them up around the classroom means that students have instant access to writing words, sentences or short paragraphs and the teacher can use what has been written as a way of assessment for learning. They are also ideal for a teacher with no classroom base. Using MWBs also removes from the teacher the impracticality of frequently handing out mini-whiteboards and taking them in again, should they rely solely on mini-whiteboards.
However, bear in mind that there are one or two advantages that mini-whiteboards have over the MWB. For example, every student has their own mini-whiteboard. You would need a lot of space around the classroom to provide every student in a class of thirty with a MWB to write on. Even one between two might be pushing it a bit.
You might not want to leave MWBs up throughout the year, but if they are left up on the wall they immediately remind the students of what they learned in a previous lesson. If they have been wiped clean, students can practise retrieval so, provide a set of marker pens on a desk at the front and as they come in, tell them to get a pen and spend the next five minutes writing all that they can remember about a previous topic on a MWB.
Mini-classrooms
Arranging MWBs around the classroom creates separate mini-classroom spaces where students can work in small groups. Practically you would need to put at least ten MWBs around the room. The students will then be able to practise their language on the boards and the teacher will be able to observe and assess what has been learned. In this way, the MWBs can be seen as learning boards or progress boards.
They can function, as my wheelie-whiteboard did, as extension boards where students write up what they’ve written in their books. Stick several MWBs around the room and then during the lesson, when a student tells you that they’ve finished some written work in their book, instead of going over to check it and feed back to the student individually, you ask them to write up what they have put in their books on a MWB so that you and the class can comment on it. Or you might first give the student some feedback on what they’ve written so that they correct it and then go and write it up; you are then using that student’s answer as a model of good practice. With several MWBs around the room many more students can work this way than on a mini-whiteboard. Using MWBs not only makes progress more visible, it means students are able to look across the class at other boards, see what other students are doing, and be inspired by it.
Using the whiteboards in practice
When I developed VFLAs like Bob-Up Classic (VFLA #1) and Señor Hunton Dice (VFLA #15) I started the activities in my traditional place at the front of the room, imparting vocabulary knowledge and modelling the correct pronunciation before beginning the VFLAs. However, thinking more deeply about the FLAs, I realised that what I was doing at the front of the class could easily be replicated by students in small groups at MWBs around the room.
To test this, I chose a class who were particularly motivated to try new activities and explained what I was trying to do: this would be Group Bob-Up (VFLA #11) with groups of three students placed at every MWB. Each group assigned one student to be the teacher-student leading Bob-Up. The teacher-student would call out the Target Language or the English for any of the words projected on a PowerPoint slide on the board at the front of the class. The other two students in each group would be sitting facing the projected list. The first to identify the Target Language word for the English word the teacher-student called out would bob up and say both the English and Target Language and win a point.
This meant that I could carry out most of the VFLAs and create more FLAs using this set-up. In other words, I was maximising opportunities for the students to practise their language knowledge in their own ‘classroom within a classroom’.
I also use the MWBs to demonstrate progress during lessons. Whenever I want students to show anyone just how much they have learned in a lesson, I tell them to get a board pen and write the vocabulary, short phrases, verb conjugation, exam paper pitfalls and so on, on any one of the MWBs on the classroom walls – and get the students to sign their names under what they have written.
1 Lemov, (2012) p. 117.
2 Ross Morrison McGill, (2013) 100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Outstanding Lessons, London, Bloomsbury Education. p. 4.
3 McGill, (2013) p. 4.
4 See http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/.
5 Andrew Old, (2010) ‘The Outstanding School’, Scenes From The Battleground (blog). See https://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/the-outstanding-school/.
Chapter 3
Introduction to the Vocab Fun Learning Activities (VFLAs)
The teacher is defined by the vocabulary teaching strategies he or she uses.
Višnja Pavičić Takač1
It’s not only having vocabulary strategies but how they are used by the teacher that matters.
In Chapter 1, I insisted that VFLAs are not games. I correct the students when they refer to them as games and half-jokingly reinforce that by saying, ‘They’re not games, they’re Fun Learning Activities.’ I even get them to repeat that back in order to emphasise positive learning behaviour. Fun without the learning implies a missing objective and a lack of strategy supporting their use. To reiterate, VFLAs are used for practising vocabulary knowledge with the students before the teacher tests retrieval.
In this section and throughout the descriptions of the VFLAs I use the terms ‘testing recall’, ‘testing retrieval’, ‘practising retrieval’ and ‘retrieval-practice’ interchangeably. They all describe the process of testing the students’ knowledge of the vocabulary once they have practised the language knowledge and have been encouraged to think about meaning.
The nature of VFLAs ensures that students repeat the Target Language words aloud, rather than silently. Research has shown that repeating words aloud increases retention rates far more effectively than silent repetition. This makes for a noisy, exciting, competitive, engaged and ultimately knowledge-rich classroom, and results in confident, interested, motivated, knowledge-rich and, ultimately, skilled students.
The VFLAs are not intended to be used in isolation, with, for example, just one VFLA at the end of the lesson. Instead, a good strategy is for the teacher to select four, five, or even six different VFLAs to get students to practise vocabulary and short phrases spaced over a number of lessons throughout the half-term, term, year or course. A term or academic year’s worth of teaching and learning would involve a range of VFLAs. Variety is good. Through the process of experimentation, the teacher learns to judge which VFLAs are best suited to a particular class and for the next topic.
VFLAs are rapid fire, so keep up the pace. The more words called out, the greater the practice. I have used six or seven VFLAs to practise one slide of key vocabulary in a twenty-minute spell with a class before practising retrieval. In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov comments, ‘the art is in the discretionary application of the techniques … There is a right and wrong time and place for every tool, and it will always fall to the unique style and vision of great teachers to apply them.’2
Changing a VFLA helps refocus students’ attention. A few minutes using one VFLA with a class followed by a quick, slick change to another VFLA grabs students’ attention and keeps them engaged. Willingham, in Why Don’t Students Like School?, recommends change as it promotes attention, and thus enhances students’ engagement and therefore their learning.3 He also says that when changing topics or starting a new activity the students’ attention needs to come back to the teacher, thus providing the teacher with a further opportunity to engage the students.4
Automaticity
Practising vocabulary knowledge with the VFLAs aims to move students further towards automaticity with the key vocabulary that frequently occurs on the reading and listening sections of the exam. Ron Martinez, in Debates in Modern Languages Education, discusses the concept of having a certain threshold vocabulary which allows students to achieve a level of performance appropriate to their ‘learning needs’.5 Students’ learning needs in the context of the GCSE exams are essentially based on the breadth of knowledge of key vocabulary (how many words they know) with some degree of depth (how the words are used in the culture, and their variety of forms and connections). Whatever topic the students are learning, they need to develop a ‘mental lexicon’, and these VFLAs work well as a means of doing this. A third factor Martinez discusses is that of fluency: ‘… another important dimension of the mental lexicon is how readily one is able to recall and use a word, and the ease with which it is used’.6 This is also referred to as ‘automaticity’, and this is the term I shall be using here.
At GCSE level, though, is it realistic to expect that in the two (or three) years that you have with a class for two lessons a week that all the students’ mental lexicons have the breadth, depth and fluency of all of the course vocabulary in their second language (L2)? To what degree has their language knowledge been enhanced so that they are fully confident in all three areas of all of the course vocabulary?
One thing I would want for my students at GCSE, particularly on the reading paper, is for them to have a good breadth of knowledge of key vocabulary and common expressions as they go into the exam. I also want them to have depth in their vocabulary knowledge and for them to demonstrate the level of automaticity that I consider essential. The degree to which this can be achieved depends on the length of time I spend with a class over the course and the amount of exposure to and practice with the Target Language I can provide.
Martinez also refers to a study carried out by Waring and Takaki (2003) on incidental exposure to new words.7 Although there is little evidence that this is an efficient means of learning vocabulary, it does help build depth. The more that students are exposed to words in other contexts, the more likely they are to learn something of the variety and subtleties of meaning the words have in combination with others.
It’s also important to remember that learning a MFL is more than just acquiring new words; students need to continually revisit words they know (or think they know). This is where the spaced practice is important: teaching the language knowledge, revisiting the knowledge and practising it again in a variety of ways before testing retrieval. Practising vocabulary with the VFLAs and testing retrieval needs to be spaced out throughout a term, academic year or GCSE course. I would not expect all students in the class to retain every word or phrase practised using VFLAs at the end of one week.
It is also important, in between practice with the VFLAs and before testing retrieval, to draw students’ attention in some way to the meaning of what has just been practised. One way of doing this is to discuss with the students their favourite sounding words. (Another is to have students assembling sentences into meaningful paragraphs, such as in several FLAs.)
The idea of spaced practice and retrieval practice, as described in Make It Stick, is supported by Pimsleur’s Memory Schedule, which emphasises the importance of asking students or testing students on their recall.8
Paul Pimsleur was a talented scholar who worked in the field of applied linguistics and developed the Pimsleur Language Learning System based on spaced repetition. An interesting and particularly relevant quote from the Modern Language Journal, to which Pimsleur contributed, sums up the strategy of the VFLAs very well:
The teacher should recall the item very frequently right after it is first presented, though interspersed with other activities which take the student’s mind off it between recalls.9
Let’s call the VFLAs these ‘other activities’. The recalls can be direct teacher questioning of students about what a word means or quizzing the whole class on their recall of vocabulary by projecting a list of words on the board, covering up the English meaning and telling the students to write as many meanings as possible down in x minutes.
The teacher could use VFLAs on a different slide to take students’ minds off the first slide, and after a while revisit that slide and test recall of the original list. The combination of using VFLAs to practise key vocabulary with a class, testing students’ recall and then reminding them of the correct answer returns the students’ knowledge of the word to 100%.
Clearly, the longer that the teacher leaves it after VFLA practice before testing students’ recall, the lower the chances that the student will recall the word correctly. This is well illustrated by Pimsleur’s graph.10
Another key piece here is to test the students’ recall once practised. With the Spanish group referred to in Chapter 1, I spaced out the recall of key exam vocabulary throughout the lessons during the final year. Pimsleur refers to this as ‘graduated interval recall’.
I don’t mind admitting that at the time I wasn’t aware of the theory behind this practice. I adopted this methodology because I found that it had a significant impact on students’ performance in past reading and listening papers, and that the students became greatly animated in lessons.
